The use of digital video has proliferated, and is expected to continue proliferating as digital data processing and data transmission speeds increase. Modifying digital video from a digital video stream having one characteristic to a digital video stream having a different characteristic is referred to generally as video transcoding. Examples of different characteristics include protocol (e.g. MPEG1 and MPEG2) and data rates, such as affected by different quantization values. When all the video information of one video stream is maintained when transcoded a different video stream lossless transcoding is said to occur. For Lossless transcoding to occur it is necessary that that the bandwidth available to the second video stream is sufficient to support the data present in the original video stream.
Currently, lossless video transcoding between protocols is accomplished by decoding a first video stream having a first protocol to generate rendered data (image data), followed by encoding the rendered data to generate a second video data stream having a second protocol. Encoding using rendered data is a computationally intensive process. Therefore, a system and/or method of transcoding would that reduces processing requirements needed for transcoding, and/or perform lossless transcoding would be useful.